


where there's smoke

by ohmygodwhy



Series: first rule of earth kingdom fight club... [6]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Developing Friendships, Gen, Mid-Canon, Relationship Study, aang's s3 pacifist moral dilemma, who knows which version of the au we're in anymore, zhao? still a bitch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-19 08:18:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19970905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmygodwhy/pseuds/ohmygodwhy
Summary: “My crew got recruited for this dumb invasion,” Zuko says after a long minute, “And then my ship got blown up. With me in it.”“Oh,” Aang says, vaguely alarmed. That explains the… general injuries. “Are you… okay?”(three varying-levels-of-bizarre conversations that aang has with zuko)





	where there's smoke

**Author's Note:**

> whenever im feeling down i fall back on atla what can i say. this fits into the fight club au And the au of that au bc i say so and bc about 1/3 of it doesn't rly make sense w/o that context. this fic assumes tht zuko is still the one who ends up teaching aang firebending and they still end up on ember island bc i say so. thank u and have some aang pov while you listen to me play god and cut canon into pieces

1\. 

When Aang leaves the Spirit World to re-enter the living one and figure out what to do about the koi fish, the first thing he sees is Zuko. Unfortunately, not the koi fish he’d been expecting.

Zuko looks up at him where he’s sitting across from him, back against the wall.

“Good to have you back,” he says. 

Aang quickly takes in his surroundings — a cave? there’s a fire, he’s tied up, there’s a crazy snow storm outside, Zuko is here — and says, “Good to be back.”

He reels back, ready to kick out, and then Zuko puts up a hand and says. “Just — wait a second.” Aang is so startled that he actually does, “It’s been a rough few fucking days for me, so can I have three minutes to, I dunno, take a breath. And then we can get back to—“ Zuko gestures vaguely, waving his hand back and forth, “— all of this.”

Aang blinks. Now that he’s looking, Zuko does look pretty messed up. There’s bruising around his eye, and his mouth, and the shadows of the little fire he has going make the lines of his scar look deeper. He looks exhausted.

“What happened?” Aang asks, curiosity taking over. A moment to breathe sounds pretty nice, even though he needs to get going and find the koi fish again soon.

Zuko raises his one eyebrow, like he didn’t expect Aang to actually give him the break he asked or actually, y’know, talk to him.

“My crew got recruited for this dumb invasion,” he says after a long minute, “And then my ship got blown up. With me in it.” 

“Oh,” Aang says, vaguely alarmed. That explains the… general injuries. “Are you… okay?”

Zuko’s eyebrow furrows in the familiar irritation Aang is used to seeing on him, but he sounds more confused than angry when he asks, “Why do you care?”

Aang shrugs as best he can in his ropes. “I was just wondering. You seem kinda tired.” 

Zuko crosses his arms over his chest defensively. “I just had to drag your ass through a snowstorm. And you’re way heavier than you should be.” 

Aang opens his mouth to say _you’re probably just tired,_ because he knows he’s not _that_ heavy, but decides better. He doesn’t wanna get Zuko too angry before Sokka and Katara find them. 

There’s a long pause, where they sit there and listen to the sound of the snow storm raging just outside the cave.

“I was in the spirit world just now,” Aang says, for lack of a better conversation topic. He doesn’t really know why he wants to talk to Zuko, but he finds that he does. He doesn’t think they’ve ever held a real conversation that didn’t consist of threats or blowing each other into walls. They’ve blown each other into walls more times than they’ve actually spoken to each other. He doesn’t really know anything about him, other than he’s a prince of the Fire Nation, he wants to catch Aang so bad that he’s followed them halfway across the world, and he’s pretty good at it. Good enough at it that he never, ever gives up.

Zuko, across from him, raises his eyebrows again. “Really. What’s it like?” He looks kind of mad that he let himself acknowledge Aang’s existence, but also waits for his answer.

“Very… spirity. There was this one spirit who steals people’s faces.” 

“Koh?” Zuko cuts in.

“Yeah, him! So, I had to ask him something, but if I changed my expression at all I would lose and he would, you know, steal my face!”

“Freaky,” Zuko says, voice deceptively monotone. “So you won.”

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

Zuko blinks at him. “Because you still have your face?” 

Aang actually laughs, despite the whole situation he’s in. “Oh, right, I do.” 

Zuko looks at him closely for a moment, like he doesn’t understand what he’s seeing, and then glances over at the mouth of the cave. It’s still storming. Aang wonders how Zuko is planning to get him back to his ship — or, wait, he doesn’t have his ship anymore. It blew up. With Zuko inside it. Aang doesn’t really like that image, of Zuko being trapped on his blowing up ship, so he forces it from his mind.

“How’d you get here?” He asks, because he figures why not at this point, things are already dire as it is. “Without your ship, I mean.”

Zuko seems to contemplate whether or not to respond. He must come to the same conclusion Aang did, because he leans back against the cave wall and says, “I snuck into one of Zhao’s.” 

“Snuck in?” They’re on the same side, right? Aang thinks. He always thought they must be working together if they shared the same goal — but Zuko did break him out of the prison Zhao had him in, so he isn’t so sure. 

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Cause he blew up my ship and tried to kill me.”

“O-Oh, that was him?” There’s so much new information Aang barely knows what to do with it all, “Why’d he do that?”

“Because he hates me, and I hate him. So fuck him.”

Aang doesn’t really know what to say to that. Fire Nation politics? Are very dangerous ones. They’ve always been complicated, even back when Aang was a hundred years younger, but never as intense as this. Probably. As far as he knows.

There’s another pause, even longer than before. Aang wonders if the three minute break is over yet. He doesn’t really wanna go out into that storm. He really hopes the others are almost here. Wonders if he should try to get out and make some kind of signal. 

The silence gets to be too much to bear. Aang shifts his weight a little. “So. How’s the Fire Nation?”

Zuko huffs, like he’s annoyed that Aang opened his mouth again. “I don’t know,” he snaps, “I haven’t exactly been there in a while.”

Aang opens his mouth once again to ask him what exactly that means, but then he hears someone yelling faintly outside. Katara, he realizes, heart lifting. 

Zuko takes that as his cue, and so Aang jumps to his feet, too. Sadly, their “three minutes” are up. 

2\. 

“So,” Aang says, trying to break the silence. 

They’ve moved Iroh into one of the abandoned houses so he wouldn’t be out there lying in the sun, and it’s his turn to Zuko-watch. Sokka is super adamant that they Don’t Let Zuko Out Of Their Sight, but isn’t actually willing to sit there with them all day and night - he went next door some time ago, claiming he hadn’t slept in three days and needed to ‘rest, okay, I’m tired, back off Toph’. Toph called him a dirty hypocrite, and has only left the room for the first time now, after she loudly declared that she needed to take a piss and stretch her poor feet for a while. Zuko hasn’t left at all. Aang’s still kind of confused as to how exactly they, you know, _know_ each other, but no one’s been able to get very many details, and tensions are so high that Katara and even Sokka don’t seem willing to push too hard. 

Aang isn’t Katara, Sokka, or Toph, and he’s pretty sure Zuko won’t try to come after him right now, not with his uncle… the way he is. 

Zuko looks up at him, folded forwards and in on himself next to the old mat where his uncle lies. He hasn’t gotten up since they put him down; Aang gets the feeling that he might be afraid to leave his uncle alone with any of them. 

“So,” he starts again, “Um. You and Toph seem like pretty good friends.”

Zuko stares at him for a moment, and shrugs, looking back down at his uncle like Aang’s barely worth the time of day. He doesn’t take it to heart; if Katara or Sokka - or probably even Toph at this point - was hurt as badly as Iroh is, he’s sure he’d be acting the same way. 

“How’d you guys, um, meet?” He presses on, because he’s the Avatar, and the Avatar can’t be scared off by silence. Even if it’s Zuko’s silence, which makes it about five times more intimidating. 

“Why do you care?” Zuko answers, and it feels kind of like they’re in that cave again, back at the North Pole. 

“I was just wondering,” he says, trying to sound casual, “It’s just that Toph’s our friend, now, too. And she seems to trust you, and you seem to trust her.” 

“So?” 

“So,” Aang pauses, and he feels kind of childish, suddenly, like he’s pushing for ideals, “You said you aren’t really the prince anymore. And Toph likes you, and you aren’t chasing me anymore, right?”

“I was literally just fighting you. I only stopped because Azula — “

They both look down at Iroh, Aang feeling strangely guilty as he does. He looks much better than he did out in the road, doesn’t look as pale or in pain, but he still hasn’t woken up yet. 

“But would you have been able to go home, if you caught me?” 

The room seems to hold its breath, in the few moments it takes Zuko to get defensive. “What would you know about it?”

“Azula said — and you said, too — that you guys are traitors, now, right? I’ve been to the Fire Nation, I had friends there, I know how serious they are about that stuff. I’m just saying…” 

“Saying what? Just say what you wanna say, stop dancing around shit.” 

“I’m just saying that since you can’t go home, and you’re friends with Toph and Toph is friends with us. You could. You know. Be friends with us, too? Maybe.” 

Zuko is looking at him like he grew a second head, or a second arrow, or told him that he’s not the Avatar after all, something equally parts pissed it and confused. There’s something vulnerable about it, like how he sounded back on the road trying to talk to his uncle, and Aang doesn’t like it when he looks or sounds like that, because it’s not at all the person that he’s built Zuko up to be in his head these past few months. 

The Zuko he built up in his head would never have made friends with someone like Toph, and would never have let Katara heal his uncle, and would never have been in a room alone with him this long without trying to catch him. He thinks that maybe the Zuko he built up in his head is gone, and the Zuko he made his image from - the Zuko back in the cave with him - is gone, now, too. He thinks maybe he’s been gone for a long time, and that somebody new is sitting here with him. It’s strange, to recognize the person you’re talking to, but not know them.

“Are you stupid?” This new Zuko says, and he sounds enough like the old Zuko that Aang can’t stop from flinching back. He sees Zuko see that, and sees him lean further away from him, too. Sees him look away. “This isn’t a fairytale. Things aren’t all sunshine and rainbows and friendship and shit. I don’t want to be friends with you.”

“Why not?”

For a moment, Zuko doesn’t actually seem to know how to answer. “Because I chased you all the way to the North Pole? Because I’ve been looking for you for three years, and then you’re twelve years old and then it doesn’t matter anymore, ‘cause I can’t go home anyways.“

“You’ve been looking for a long time,” Aang says slowly, considering. He always figured that Zuko was like Zhao, that he saw the opportunity and took it, that he was Bad like Sokka said all Fire Nation soldiers these days were Bad, and that was all there was to it. “I didn’t know that.” 

“I _found_ you,” Zuko says, and he doesn’t sound angry at Aang; Aang isn’t sure who exactly he’s angry at, but he doesn’t think it’s him, “everyone said I would never find you but I did, and now it doesn’t matter. I can’t go home, and it doesn’t matter.” 

“Is that why you wanted to fine me so bad?” Aang asks, right on the verge of understanding something, “‘Cause you wanted to go home?”

Zuko crosses his arms before he shrugs, curling further in on himself. Without his armor or his ship or his anger, Zuko truly doesn’t seem like the person he remembers at all. 

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he says again.

“I think it matters,” Aang offers, “I wanted to go home, too, when I first woke up here. It felt like it had barely been a day since I left, but I wanted to go tell everyone I was… that I was sorry for leaving. But I got there, and a hundred years had passed. Everyone was dead. Everything was gone.”

Zuko swallows, looking uncomfortable. “Sorry,” he says, as if he was personally responsible for it. 

Aang is taken aback for a moment. “It’s okay,” Zuko looks at him like he’s crazy, and he says, “Well, it’s not _okay_ , but. What I’m saying is I get how you feel about going home. I really do. It’s just, sometimes home isn’t there anymore, or it’s not the same, or you just can’t get there. And you have to find somewhere else, instead.” 

“And you’re saying my ‘somewhere else’ is with you guys,” Zuko says flatly, mocking, but there’s something underneath it. 

“Maybe,” Aang says, shrugging his shoulders, “I don’t know. But it could be. I’m sorry you can’t go home, but _you_ found me, right? I don’t think that’s for nothing.” 

Zuko folds his fingers together in his lap, looks at Aang until he looks away, and doesn’t seem to have anything else to say. 

All in all, Aang thinks it was better than their cave talk, all things considered. Toph comes stomping in a few moments later, making her entrance know, and if Aang didn’t know better, he’d think that she might’ve been listening. 

“Hey, Sparky,” she says, “You should sleep.”

“‘M not tired,” Zuko finally says, sounding tired.

“Bullshit. If it’s Sokka you’re worried about, he’s passed out next door.”

“I’m not worried about _Sokka_ ,” Zuko scoffs, and Toph smiles. 

“Of course not. But you should get some fuckin’ rest anyways. Me and Aang’ll watch your uncle, right Aang?”

“Right,” Aang agrees quickly. 

Zuko glares at Aang for a moment or two, and then rubs at his eyes and sighs. “Fine,” He says, “But wake me up if anything happens.”

“Of course,” Toph says, gentler that Aang’s ever heard her sound in the few days she’s been with them. 

Zuko grabs one of the old, dusty blankets they found a few houses down, and curls up on the floor — unwilling to leave his uncle even while he sleeps. 

Aang thinks about Katara, and understands. 

3.

Aang knows he storms off, and he knows that he yelled, and he knows that his friends are just trying to help, but he also knows that none of them understand the position they’ve put him in — no, that’s not fair. The position the world put him in? Maybe the position he put himself in, by running away all those years ago. 

The idea of it all was fine a year ago, when it was a far off concept. It wasn’t horrible when Roku told him about the comet, either — he knew that he would have to defeat the Firelord, but if he didn’t think too deeply about how exactly he would have to do that, it was fine. The time wasn’t now, he didn’t have to do it now, it was sometime in the future. 

(He wonders, if he had actually had the chance to fight the Fire Lord during the invasion, would he have been able to kill him? Would he have lost? He tries not to dwell on it too much, because he thinks he knows the answer.)

It’s different now, now that it’s close. Now that it’s _time_. Now that everyone in the world is relying on him to kill a man to save them all — and he knows it’ll save them, if he does it. But there has to be some other way to stop all of it. If there isn’t, Aang doesn’t know what he’ll do. 

He hears footsteps behind him, and rubs at his stinging eyes, curling forwards where he’s sitting on the beach. 

“Sorry for yelling, Katara, I didn’t — “ 

“Not Katara,” Zuko says, “And she’s not mad at you for yelling.”

Aang doesn’t know why he’s surprised that it’s Zuko who came after him, but he still is. 

He rubs at his eyes some more, because he doesn’t know what Zuko would think of him crying about having to kill _Zuko’s_ father, when Zuko doesn’t seem all that broken up about it himself.

“Are you okay?” Zuko asks, dropping down to sit next to him in the sand. 

Aang shrugs. “No. I don’t know.”

“This is a big deal to you, huh?” Zuko says, and Aang wonders if it’s not a big deal to Zuko, what they have to do. He decides that there’s nothing to lose by asking.

“Is it not, to you?”

Zuko shrugs, too, tracing nonsense shapes in the sand next to him, “It’s what needs to be done. It’s needed to be done for a long time; probably should’ve been done decades ago, before it was even my — before it was Ozai on the throne.” 

“No matter which… Firelord it should’ve been, it would still be trading out one life for another.”

“He represents more than just one person, Aang. Stopping him means stopping all of it. You know that.” 

Aang does know that. He doesn’t want to know that, but he does. 

They watch the waves on the beach for a few minutes, before Zuko speaks again. 

“Do you want me to be one hundred percent honest with you?” he offers. 

Aang braces himself and says “Yes.”

“This wouldn’t be your first time killing somebody. You killed hundreds of Fire Nation soldiers at the North Pole. It took us almost a week to float past all of them.” 

Aang feels like he’s gonna be sick. He goes on the defensive immediately, reflexively, “That’s wasn’t _me_ ,” he says, “I wasn’t — I wasn’t _me_ , then, it was the ocean spirit. It was just — working through me.”

“But you did the bending, right?” Zuko says, voice surprisingly non-judgmental, “You controlled the water. The water is what killed people. What drowned people.” 

“No, that wasn’t — I didn’t _mean_ to do that. I didn’t want to use the Avatar state for a long time, after that, I didn’t...”

“Okay,” Zuko says, “Sorry. I’m not trying to be an asshole, but you wanted me to be honest. And honestly, it’s one person, not hundreds.”

“But I would be myself, this time. I would be making the choice, and I would be making the choice to kill.”

“I’ve met people who have done worse,” Zuko says, “Uncle Iroh was the one in charge of the siege of Ba Sing Se until he called it off, and he’s one of the kindest, wisest people I know. I’m pretty sure my mother killed my grandfather, and she’s still a good person. She did it to protect me; she saved my life doing it. You’d be saving the lives of literally millions of people.” 

Aang thinks about this for a long moment, thrown off. “Your mom killed your grandfather? Like, the old Firelord?”

Zuko looks decidedly uncomfortable about the emphasis on his mother’s apparent murder. “Well. Yes. He was going to have my father kill me, so she made a compromise with Ozai to get him the throne and save my life as a bonus, I guess. It was all very mysterious to me when I was a kid.” 

“Maybe we should have given you that award.” 

“What award?”

“Oh, nothing,” he quickly changes the subject back to the one at hand, “I just. The monks taught me that all life is precious — I’m even a vegetarian, right? — and taking a life, even the life of an animal or plant, is one of the worst things you can do. I know this is a war, and people have to do hard things during a war, but. I don’t…”

“You don’t what?”

“I don’t wanna become a bad person. I don’t wanna… cross that line, I guess.”

Zuko seems to think, for a long moment. “There was a crew member of mine, back when I had my ship, who I’m pretty sure got stuck with me because they caught him stealing from his commanding officer.” 

Aang is taken aback by the sudden tonal shift, “What did he steal?” he asks, interested despite himself. 

“All kinds of things — I heard that he would bring him his meals and take the best things off the plate, and that he sold one of the fancy medals the general got from my father. He’s the one who taught me the quickest ways to cut through chains.”

“Nice skill to have,” Aang remarks. “Did he ever get caught for the food thing?”

“No, the reason he got discharged was because he was sleeping with his general’s wife,” Zuko says blandly, casually, “But he was — well, he wasn’t a _great_ person at heart, but he was better than Zhao. He tried to cheer me up a lot my first few months there, while I was still recovering. He showed me how to pick a lock with a screwdriver.”

“A screwdriver?” Aang is suddenly distracted from his mounting apprehension. “I’ve seen Sokka pick a lock with a knife before, but not a screwdriver.”

“It can’t be too big, but it’s not that hard once you get the hang of it.”

“Could you show me sometime?”

“Sure. Anyway, I think my point was that people aren’t either good or bad. Doing a bad thing doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person.”

“I know that,” Aang says, “Or else you wouldn’t be here, like, teaching me.”

Zuko tilts his head in grudging acknowledgment. “Sure. But why don’t you hold yourself to the same standard? Are you better than everyone else?”

His tone isn’t harsh, but Aang flinches all the same. “Of course not. I just… I don’t know if I could live with myself if I took away someone else’s.” 

“But that’s the thing,” Zuko says, coming back full circle, “You already have.”

“The ocean spirit — ”

“Yeah, I know you didn’t mean to. But you still did it, and you’re still here, obviously living. What makes this different?” 

“Isn’t he your father?” Aang finally manages to say. It’s something all of them have avoided mentioning until now, because none of them really knew how to broach the subject. “Why are you pushing so hard for me to kill him?”

“Because I know him,” Zuko says, “Because I grew up with him, and I know what he’s willing to do to get what he wants. He didn't care that I was his son. He doesn’t care about how much _you_ don’t want to kill him, or how old you are, or that you’re the Avatar. He just cares about how strong you are — and if you’re not strong enough, he’ll kill you. And he won’t feel bad about it.” 

Aang is shocked into silence. Zuko’s eye contact is so intense and serious that he has to look away, trains his eyes on the ground to get away from it, and to get away from the harsh reality Zuko is throwing at him. 

“There has to be another way,” he manages to say when the silence has dragged on a little too long.

“If there was, I’d say go for it,” Zuko says, voice much softer than it was a few minutes ago. It makes something in Aang sad, knowing that Zuko’s voice can sound like that and that it barely ever does. “But I don’t think there is.”

Aang doesn’t know how to answer, and Zuko doesn’t say anything else, either.

**Author's Note:**

> do they have screwdrivers in the atla universe? well they have metal boats and giant drill things so im assuming yes. just go with it
> 
> comment to help me get like. actually get a job interview as dorm move-in day gets closer and closer. also come [talk to me](http://gaycinema.tumblr.com/) about this dumb au bc i actually have no plans for it and am writing whatever i feel like as it comes


End file.
